Trans-Generational Trauma
Prager, J. (2003). Lost childhood, lost generations: the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Journal of Human Rights, 2, 173-181.
Note the journal.
From Prager: “What is lost, in a word, is an identity that demarcates the children’s experience from their parents: what is produced, in the same instance, is lost childhoods and lost generations.” (p. 174)
From Prager: “Freud suggests that overwhelming experience is taken up into what passes as normal ego and as permanent trends within it; and, in this manner, passes trauma from one generation to the next. In this way, trauma expresses itself as time standing still… Traumatic guilt — for a time buried except through the character formation of one generation after the next — finds expression in an unconscious reenactment of the past in the present.” (p. 176)
From Prager: “Trauma, as a wound that never heals, succeeds in transforming the subsequent world into its own image, secure in its capacity to re-create the experience for time immemorial. It succeeds in passing the experience from one generation to the next. The present is lived as if it were the past. The result is that the next generation is deprived of its sense of social location and its capacity to creatively define itself autonomously from the former… when time becomes distorted as a result of overwhelming events, the natural distance between generations, demarcated by the passing of time and changing experience, becomes obscured.” (p. 176)
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